Samsung ECX-1
I couldn’t resist picking up this oddity. The Samsung ECX-1 designed by Porsche Design and winner of the 1995 ‘iF’ Product design award is shall we say unique looking. It is jammed with features for a point and shoot camera with notable modes such as “Fuzzy Zoom” Which you might think isn’t a good thing but in this case it refers to the buzzword of the day back in the 1990’s “Fuzzy Logic” A fancy way of saying it used an algorithm to adjust zoom and shutter speed so that you had a better chance of not taking a fuzzy picture. There are more permutations of settings than I care to describe but I do like that it also provides manual focus and multi exposure.
As first received the camera had an issue with a stuck button from a botched repair so I rectified that but should have considered why someone had had it apart in the first place. As it turns out it had issues. It appeared to function properly but inside it was conspiring against me. Images were not merely out of focus it looks like the internal lens elements were out of place and it wasn’t consistent, a few images were in focus which may have depended on focal length settings. The rest took on a painterly look both in softness and colour.
By the time I post this I will have already recycled the camera so that no one else wastes a roll of film but at least for a moment it was nice to have one of the most unique cameras from the 1990’s
